Planet::Articles
The 2008 ACM South Pacific Programming Contest Results have been confirmed: my team's come 3rd overall (as expected). We find out whether or not we've achieved a wild card position in the World Finals in December.
The ACM ICPC South Pacific Region was on yesterday, and was great fun (as usual). My team this year, the Mehffort Musketeers consisted of Alex Berry (who'll be competing in the Google Code Jam regionals soon as well), Michael Ford and myself.
For the benefit of people who did the ICPC this year: I solved problem A, C and I; Michael solved B and D, and Alex solved E, F and H. Here's some general commentary on the problems that I solved:
- Problem A was very simple, and the shell of my solution was complete within three minutes of the contest starting. Unfortunately, the entire problem was not defined until halfway through the test data, which led me to finishing it a bit later.
- Problem C, which seems to have been the problematic problem this year (as far as judging's concerned) was relatively straightforward, though I had two rather annoying bugs that took me about an hour to week out... it happens, I suppose. Solved on the first submission, which I'm happy about.
- Problem I was a longest path problem, that was relatively straightforward depending on what sort of algorithm you chose to solve it. I've heard reports of people using the Bellman-Ford Algorithm and failing -- as far as I can tell, such an algorithm would work on problems except where there existed a cycle not involving the endpoints of the path taken in the problem. I used Floyd's Algorithm and had it solved first time. Simple.
As alluded to earlier, we solved 8 problems, and we're currently the only team to do so with the testing data used on the day (this means that we're in a provisional first place), however, there are many teams who are likely to get problem C rejudged, and following that we'll likely be third. More news to come.
For the benefit of those who were intersted, Mehffort is a portmanteau of meh and effort, and is a very popular word in the semester 2, 2008 Maclab dialect of English. It is used to convey one's lack of motivation towards a particular task. In context:
- Me: Paris, help me come up with a witty slogan for the TUCS T-Shirt.
- Paris: Mehffort.
As proud denizens of the Maclab, my ACM ICPC team for this year decided to adopt the word as part of our team name.
I found this very useful news service today, at HasTheLHCDestroyedTheEarth.com.
May you find it informative.
So the new version of Debian is to be known as Squeeze, eh?
Does anyone else think of a certain 1970's British New Wave group?
Bad ads are one of many things that annoy me when I watch commercial television: normally this is quite infrequently, but due to the large sports event currently being broadcast on my local Seven Network affiliate, I'm being subjected to more than my usual allocation of bad ads.
Few ads are more annoying than Harvey Norman's: bad jingles played to buggery, shoutey voiceovers, etc, etc, etc. Today, I was pleasantly surprised that they've put some effort into a new ad campaign. Their tagline? Nearly 50 years of Harvey Norman. Following the link to their web site, I found that Harvey Norman started trading in 1961, or for those of you who are mathematically impaired, 47 years ago. This leads to two separate conclusions:
- This is a highly desperate campaign designed to coincide with the Olympics, and will disappear very quickly.
- This is a highly desperate search for an interesting tag line, for a 6-year ad campaign (with a minor change in tag line to happen in three years time).
This is certainly a new low for Harvey Norman, and I hope that it is removed from my attention as soon as possible.
We randomly found this searching for marshmallows today in the Mac Lab.
If anyone can explain this, it'd be much appreciated.
On September 4, 2006, I wrote the following:
Today, Hobart's first Starbuck's Coffee store opened. I'm going to celebrate by not going!
It seems that I've almost succeeded in my quest to never visit Starbucks here... In the SMH today, it was announced that the Hobart Starbucks will be closing in the near future. I can't say that I'm unhappy.
(If any mainlanders are perturbed by the lack of a Starbucks when they visit Hobart for LCA, may I recommend Oomph Coffee on Liverpool Street as a far better replacement.)
So I was upgrading my Debian installation the other day, and saw the following...
Get:18 http://mirror.internode.on.net lenny/main khelpcenter 4:4.0.0.really.3.5.9.dfsg.1-4 [2339kB]
Rather interesting version number, don't you think?
I was in the TUU Shop today, and did a double-take as I saw my surname staring back at me (it's in the top left corner of the wrapper).
Why a Brazilian chocolate company would call themselves "Neugebauer" is beyond me -- but I shalln't complain. The occasional ego trip can be healthy.
(Oh, and the chocolate itself wasn't particularly nice. Oh well :()
